She stepped down off the chair slowly, turned the skep over onto the sheet, and propped one edge on a stone so there was a gap at the bottom. Then she stood back and pointed at the gap.
"Look," she said to the gardener's boy, who had crept closer. "They're going in. That means the queen is inside. By dusk, they'll all be home, and you can carry the whole thing back over the wall, and they'll never know they left."
The boy looked. The bees on the sheet were walking in a steady stream into the dark under the skep, fanning their wings as they went, like people waving each other through a door.
Nobody on the terrace had been stung. The fire had gone out in the lantern. And Isabel, who had forgotten for a whole quarter of an hour that she was a piece of furniture, remembered it all at once. She turned around. Every face in the doorway was looking at her.
"My companion," said Lady Livia into the silence, with a light laugh, "has the most surprising rustic talents. I really had no idea. Isabel, dear, you have something crawling on your collar."
A few people laughed. Isabel brushed the bee off her collar with the side of her finger very gently and set it on the edge of the sheet. Then she went back to her chair behind Lady Livia's chair, sat down in it, folded the shawl on her knee, and looked at nothing.
She noticed that Lady Livia's hand, where it held her closed fan, was white across the knuckles. She did not understand why. It was only a swarm.
She did not know then that she had been watched. Above the terrace, there was a long window in the library, and a man had been standing at it with a letter in his hand that he had forgotten to read. He had seen the whole of it, from the first scream to the last bee walking in under the straw. He had seen her face while she did it. It was not the face of a companion; it was not the face of anybody he had ever met in a drawing room. It was the face of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and was not in the least afraid.
The Duke of Hensley put the letter down unread. He stood at the window a long while after the terrace was empty. He would tell her a year later, on a hillside in the west, that it was the first time in his life he had wanted to go down a flight of stairs toward somebody instead of away.
Old Kezia had seen a great many things come up that track in all her years on the hill. She had seen a bishop come up it once on a donkey and go down again faster than he came. She had seen tinkers and taxmen and a runaway bride with her veil in her pocket. She had seen a village girl climb it every morning for a whole summer and then refuse to go down—and that girl had become Isabel's mother.
She had never seen a duke.